Karen is a strategist and engagement specialist with Crestview Strategy. Throughout her two-decade long career Karen has built a reputation for her mastery of crisis management, her ability to identify challenges, and leverage opportunities to deliver client objectives. An expert at fostering collaboration among parties by identifying common goals and objectives, she offers clients expertise in community, stakeholder, and Indigenous engagement, transformative leadership, change management, and policy development.

Prior to joining Crestview Strategy, Karen led an environmental consulting firm, building on a previous role serving First Nations leadership as Director of Justice at Chiefs of Ontario where she advanced innovative and strategic policy solutions to legacy challenges. In 2016, she co-founded BOLD Realities leading initiatives to advance economic reconciliation and partnered with TakingITGlobal to co-create whose.land, a web-based mobile app that provides users with information about Indigenous territories.

Karen previously led Ontario’s administrative justice system at Tribunals Ontario, where she was responsible for strategy, stakeholder engagement and consultation, legal compliance, communications, Indigenous relations, and modernization for its 19 constituent tribunals, including key transformations at the Ontario Parole Board, Human Rights Tribunal Ontario, and most recently, the Landlord and Tenant Board. She successfully led Tribunal Ontario’s first public engagement strategy at the onset of the pandemic to hear directly from Ontario citizens on matters relating to access to justice.

A graduate of the University of Toronto, the University of Ottawa’s French Common Law Program, and Osgoode Hall’s Intensive Program in Aboriginal Lands, Resources, and Governments, Karen was the youngest and most recent graduate to be inducted into the Faculty of Law’s Honour Society in 2014 for using legal education as a foundation for making significant contributions to society. She was named Public Policy Forum’s 2018 Prime Ministers of Canada Fellow and received CivicAction’s 2018 Emerging Leader Award.

A sought-after speaker and advisor on Indigenous reconciliation, Karen brings her expertise to a number of advisory and governance boards including TC Energy, Prospectors and Developers

Association of Canada, Forward Summit, Resource Works’ Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase, Venture For Canada, Banff Forum, Canadian Club Toronto, and Connected North. She serves on juries for Canadian policy awards The Donner Prize and The Hunter Prize and is a contributing writer at thehub.ca Karen is Ojibwe from Dokis First Nation.